Google Divvy

Divvy is an app for college students to track and budget their finances.

This is a project I did at Kendall in my New Media Design class. This was a piece that really helped me to refine my process because I was able to do the design all the way from start to finish. I started with the discover step by researching financial apps to find a new direction to take. I then created an app definition statement, “Divvy is an app for college students to track and budget their finances.” Next I began the define step by doing card sorting with several college students. This is writing down potential features of the app and having them rate the features most to least important to see what to scrap and what to make central to the app. I also created user personas and a context scenario for one of the users showing how he would come across and use the app in his normal life.

Then I moved to the design stage by creating lo-fidelity wireframe sketches to get my ideas for the app onto paper. I refined these by doing hi fidelity wireframes in photoshop. These were built to scale so I was able to check placement and sizing of elements. I then created a mood-board that showed Google’s branding and a few of their current apps as well as a few apps that i was pulling inspiration from. Using this as a guide, I designed out the UI on each kind of screen for the app.

Next was the develop stage which for this piece, meant creating a prototype. I did so in Proto.io which allowed me to make a mostly functional app to begin user testing.

The devise step is the user testing and analysis phase. I had about 8 users complete two tasks within my prototype. Using an app called Silverback, I recorded their gestures, clicks and facial expressions to see any difficulties of successes they had. This gave me a lot of good feedback on improvements that could be made. I then went back to the design stage (the beauty of iterative design) and tweaked my design to be more effective. This is as far as i have gotten so far but hope to do more user testing and continue to improve the app. Ultimately, if this were for real the app would do well in user testing and go to the final step which is to deploy the app!